Many of you will know of Doc Rowe, Britain’s greatest living folklorist, who has been in the news recently following the launch of a crowdfunding campaign to help digitise and preserve all of Doc Rowe’s extraordinary audiovisual footage of Britain’s wyrd-and-wonderful seasonal events and enduring folk traditions.
Traditional song and customs have been the focus of Doc Rowe’s life. He has been attending, filming, photographing and recording seasonal folk events across The Britain Isles since 1963, which has seen him amass an enviable collection which is currently housed in Whitby, North Yorkshire. The material stockpiled there is an irreplaceable one-of-a-kind document of local traditions and vernacular culture spanning the past 60 years.
Fifth Column Films, the same folks that bought us Way of the Morris and The Ballad of Shirley Collins, are close to completing a new feature documentary about the indefatigable folklorist Doc Rowe. The documentary film will be both a celebration of the people and the events Doc has documented, as well as of Doc himself as he searches for a permanent home for his life’s work.
A seasoned teacher, speaker, broadcaster and writer on traditional song and custom, Doc is in demand for his knowledge. He is a committee member of the Folklore Society and the Oral History Society, and a member the Traditional Song Forum, and has been awarded an honorary doctorate and the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s Gold Badge for his services to traditional song and dance.
The Museum of British Folklore, who have previously collaborated with Doc Rowe on exhibitions to draw attention to the valuable work, made this short video montage eleven years ago that gives a great feel for the richness of folklore and customs covered.
For this new documentary, Fifth Column Films were motivated to make the film by a desire to spread awareness of this astonishing archive. However, rather than restrict themselves to advocacy, they thought they would use the opportunity to be part of the solution. To this end, they launched a crowdfunding campaign to digitise ALL of Doc’s film and video footage related to traditions and folk customs.
As well as featuring in the news, the campaign has also exceeded their £58,000 target, which will allow them to permanently secure the material for posterity. The material will be digitised to BFI specifications and then housed in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library in Cecil Sharp House, London. They will also explore how the material can ultimately be shared with the communities that it documents and with the wider public.
They tell us that there’s still a huge amount of work to do – marking up and cataloguing it, not to mention trawling through all 1,500 hours of it, selecting material to go into the film. They are asking the public to keep donating to help them manage the huge task ahead, and if there were any rewards you were keen on but missed out on, please do contact them and they’ll do what they can to oblige!
More details can be found here: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/docrowe